I made several mistakes. Chief among them was jumping into the relationship before I got to know her (we only dated for about a week), but I also put off ending it way too long (I started to see it would fail and didn't do anything about it as fast as I should have). I blame myself. I managed to delude myself into thinking Marie was everything I wanted her to be, just as I did with my previous crush, Yvonne (except in that case my delusion wasn't wholesale wrong). Apparently this is the way I learn: By painful trial and error. I'm just inexperienced, I think. A good painter would see the novice's mistake. A good martial artist would see the better way of beating that guy in the bar fight (a good diplomat would find a way to avoid the fight altogether).

Someone experienced in the art of girlfriendery would easily spot my mistakes.

Marie is sweet and well-intentioned, no doubt, but she's not the girl for me. We're on different sides of the bell curve and I believe we're incompatible for chiefly that reason. I guess I'm not exempt from delusion and I hope I've been badly enough burned by this to not put my hand on the wrong plate again. Anyway, I've dug myself quite the emo hole and it's time to begin my slow crawl up from it.

I majorly redid the Links page, shuffling things around and removing several links that I didn't use (most notably many web comic links and all the Half-Life single player modification links), in addition to rewriting the whole thing.